Blood Drive

The pilot hour delivers with blood-soaked gusto. The second hour gets more amusing. And wit can be the saving grace for casual viewers of the grindhouse genre.

While it is no heir to what Rodriguez and Tarantino did, Blood Drive is an indulgent "Grindhouse” for all the modern direct-to-video goofiness and weirdness you can only watch at home now anyway.

The deteriorated film effects and the adrenalized driving become less important and instead there are extended subplots involving the possibility of Blood Drive becoming a network TV show or delving into the relationships of the other drivers and the result is a show that's vastly more watchable. The more Blood Drive goes for comedy, the more Slink becomes central and the better Cunningham gets to be.

As semi-ironic, dark and comic exercises in genre go, it is not as clever or carefully shaped as "Ash vs. Evil Dead." But it is miles ahead of "Sharknado" (which also lives on Syfy) and on the whole well-produced and directed, though its effectiveness varies from episode to episode and even from sequence to sequence.

[Grace (Christina Ochoa) and Arthur (Alan Ritchson)] are paired as partners in the race, and their good cop/bad girl dynamic works pretty well. The real attention-getter here, though, is Colin Cunningham, who is hilariously invested in his role as Julian Slink, a sort of steampunk master of ceremonies for the race. It’s hard to make an impression in a series that is so insane, but Mr. Cunningham (who played John Pope in “Falling Skies”) manages it.

Calling Blood Drive a rom-com would be stretching things, but it is refreshing to see that love can still bloom in a world where, if you softly whispered, “I would die for you,” most of the population would take you up on the offer.

The result features a large amount of dismemberment and has the good grace not to take itself seriously. [16 Jun 2017, p.53]

The cast walks an excellent line between tuned-in and too-cheeky, flaunting their toned abs and cut cheekbones as shamelessly as the show that hired them, while the series itself shamelessly veers through all manner of lewd and ludicrous territory. A lot of people will hate this show. I’m happy to be one of the people who loves it.

The show arguably has the worst potty-mouth in the history of basic cable, and its humor often meanders the line between penile and puerile. A race driver named Clown Dick is funny, kinda; a female police sergeant screaming "Suck my dick!" kinda less.

Rather than turning to its characters to provide a reason to tune in, the show throws every absurdist and titillating trick it can think of at the viewer, hoping one of them will jolt the senses enough each week to return for a fix of more.

At its best, Blood Drive is sloppy, silly, squirm-inducing fun, particularly when it focuses on the race. The acting is generally weak and the writing is awful, but the effects are slickly produced and the visuals consistently evoke the many grindhouse classics that inspired it.